[PDF]Copernicus Essay On Money Trans Malsbary

LOSHY ON
MONEY


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Copernicus


Translated from the original Latin by Gerald Malsbary
Editors. Ralph Benko & Charles Kadlec


foreword by Lewis Lehrman


ESSAY ON MONEY


ESSAY ON MONEY


"On the Minting of Money"
by Nicolas Copernicus (1526)


Translated from the original Latin
by Gerald Malsbary


Edited by Ralph Benko
and Charles Kadlec


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"A Laissez Faire Books
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Copyright O 2013 by Ralph Benko
Foreword copyright O 2013 by Lewis E. Lehrman
All rights reserved.
www.lfb.org
ISBN: 978-1-62129-1-084


Cover art: Mena Fusco


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An Essential Resource for Enlightened Minds Since 1972


Contents


Foreword to the Laissez Faire Edition by Lewis E.
Lehrman


Introduction by Ralph Benko
Translator's Preface by Gerald Malsbary
On the Minting of Money


1. Theoretical Foundations


2. The Debasement of Prussian Currency —
A Brief History


3. A Plan for Reform


Epilogue on the Restoration of Money
Appendix: Latin Original


Notes


Foreword to the
Laissez Faire Edition
by Lewis E. Lehrman


A Great Scientist and His Money


WE ABIDE IN A SOLAR SYSTEM first revealed by the great astronomer
Nicolas Copernicus. So it was that the equally great astronomer Ptolemy,
one millennium and a half after his death, did yield to the genius of his peer,
Copernicus. The mathematical proofs that Ptolemy used to show the Earth
as the center of the solar system were superseded by the verifiable
calculations of Copernicus. The Earth did revolve regularly around the sun,
not the other way ‘round as Ptolemy's detailed calculations suggested.

Thus, we live in a Copernican world, preceded by the “Copernican
revolution."

To read and reread the treatise of Copernicus on the minting of
money is to see a true genius at work establishing the scientific rules of the
monetary universe — that is, the earthly monetary economy that carried the
world beyond barter and into the realm of economic growth and the
industrial revolution.

What Copernicus established as the scientific rules governing money
are as true today as are the path-breaking rules of Copernicus governing the
solar system.

Read on and see for yourself.

Lewis E. Lehrman
June 23, 2013


Introduction
by Ralph Benko


The Golden Intellectual Provenance of the Gold Standard


THE CLASSICAL GOLD STANDARD has a more profound pedigree
than many know.

It is fairly widely understood that the classical gold standard
originally was designed, in 1717, by Sir Isaac Newton, then master of the
mint of Great Britain. It lasted for two centuries, and it is an irony of history
that John Law's notorious experiment with paper money, which ruined his
investors, France, and himself and lasted but three years, was initiated 1n the
same year.

The fact of Newton's role as architect alone would provide the gold
standard with a most dignified intellectual provenance. Now comes a new,
meticulously researched, and lucidly devised translation by classicist Gerald
Malsbary (PhD, University of Toronto, 1988; currently director of first-year
symposium at Belmont Abbey College).

Through this translation, scholars, intellectuals, and policy makers
readily will be able to discern that the fundamental intellectual groundwork
for the classical gold standard was laid by another scientific icon, Nicolas
Copernicus. Yes, Copernicus, the very same who placed the sun in the
center of the solar system.

Prof. Malsbary's translation shows Copernicus's widely overlooked
tract On the Minting of Money as no more dated than heliocentricity,
contemporary and as lucid as anything ever written on monetary policy.
Copernicus was as great a stylist as Lord Keynes. And — as his
fundamental breakthrough in astronomy suggests — Copernicus was the
more rigorously scientific thinker.

Copernicus's observations are as pertinent today as when he
composed them in 1526. Prof. Malsbary has compared all available extant
earlier translations of this work into English and, moreover, provides a rich
critical apparatus. Malsbary hereby furnishes an invaluable addition both to


scholarship and to the contemporary policy discourse, now fomenting in the
United States Congress and around the world, on monetary reform.

Economists seek to present their work as rigorous science. It
therefore is an irony and an oddity that modern academic economists find
themselves falling within the political provenance of William Jennings
Bryan and Richard Nixon rather than the scientific provenance of
Copernicus and Newton.

Bryan's great silver-tongued speech at the Democratic convention of
1896 propelled him then, and twice later, to a presidential nomination and
finally into the role of secretary of state under President Wilson. On the
convention floor he declaimed against the restoration of the classical gold
standard. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of
thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

And yet, notwithstanding these resounding phrases (which failed to
propel him into the presidency, which went to his Republican rival, William
McKinley, who instituted the gold standard in 1900), Bryan was not greatly
respected by his contemporaries as a thinker. As Roger T. Johnson wrote in
Historical Beginnings ... The Federal Reserve (published by the Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston, revised 2010, p. 20).


For years Bryan had a reputation as one of the nation's most
outstanding and enthralling public speakers, but some people who
knew him best believed that the power of his oratory concealed the
paucity of his intellect. One of his cabinet colleagues later sneered: “I
discovered that one could drive a prairie schooner through any part of
his argument and never scrape against a fact or a sound statement."


More ironically yet, Bryan today probably is best remembered for his role
in prosecuting Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes for daring to teach
evolution in the public schools of Tennessee — as dramatized in the play
Inherit the Wind. How odd, then, that the academic experts should ignore
Copernicus and Newton to embrace the position of Bryan, a creationist, in
championing fiduciary paper currency (itself monetary creationism).

How odd, also, that academics, almost unanimously of a progressive
political bent, should find themselves apologists for a monetary policy


visited upon the world by Richard Nixon. Nixon was, from his earliest days,
and remains in memory, something of a béte noire of progressives. And yet
the preeminent progressive economists of today find themselves in effect
apologists for a policy the legacy of Richard M. Nixon.

Even Karl Marx was for the gold standard. And yet, progressives
remain the only remaining enthusiastic champions of the last vestige of
Nixon's “New Economic Policy,” the final repudiation of the gold standard.
It strikes this writer as no coincidence that the stagnation of middle-class
earnings — and the emergence of severe income inequality — correlates
tightly with the embrace of a system of free-floating (or, rather, sinking)
paper currency.

Why, then, do progressive academic economists obsessively defend
this last artifact of Nixonomics? A vast, and unwarranted, disdain among
economists clouds the reputation of the classical gold standard. The most
likely answer derives from what the late professor Jacques Rueff (member
of L' Académie francaise and of the Ordre national de la Légion
d'honneur), writing in The Monetary Sin of the West (Macmillan Company,
1972, pp. 23-24), termed “the outcome of an unbelievable collective
mistake which, when people become aware of it, will be viewed by history
as an object of astonishment and scandal."

The "unbelievable collective mistake" that he refers to was the
supplanting of the classical, or true, gold standard with the “gold-exchange
standard." The Great Depression was attributed, falsely (although not
maliciously), to the gold standard. But the true gold standard had been
suspended almost a decade prior, at Genoa, to be replaced by its “evil twin,"
the superficially similar but inherently defective gold-exchange standard.
Prof. Rueff called it a grotesque caricature of the gold standard.

Public intellectuals (although not, yet, most academic economists) are
beginning to unwind this crucial collapsed distinction. Perforce, new
interest in the classical gold standard is beginning to arise in the policy
discourse. A renewed appreciation of the classical gold standard is evident
from the fact of its proponents recently being treated with dignity in
respected venues such as . ProCon.org, Debate.org, and
IntelligenceSquared.com.

Perhaps Hayek (himself no proponent of the classical gold standard),
in his Nobel Prize lecture delivered December 11, 1974, put his finger on


the root cause of the disdain that academic economists show toward the
classical gold standard. He entitled this lecture “The Pretence of
Knowledge”:


There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run
dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of
assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is
with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly
wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my
field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks
superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most
unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite
limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to
entrust to science — or to deliberate control according to scientific
principles — more than scientific method can achieve may have
deplorable effects. The progress of the natural sciences in modern
times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any
suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse
suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have
hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally
regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to
the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society
entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the
exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to
produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more
often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps
not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our
profession are not always prepared to accept this. Yet the confidence
in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false
belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-
made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of
scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking
recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if
the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking
that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.... If


we are to safeguard the reputation of science, and to prevent the
arrogation of knowledge based on a superficial similarity of
procedure with that of the physical sciences, much effort will have to
be directed toward debunking such arrogations, some of which have
by now become the vested interests of established university
departments. (Emphasis in original.)


The more impetuous members of the profession of economics, whether
young or old, indeed could benefit by soberly “debunking such
arrogations." To begin this there hardly can be a better place to start than
Copernicus's On the Minting of Money.

Profound gratitude is due to this volume's co-editor, Charles Kadlec,
for the critical role he played in commissioning Prof. Malsbary to undertake
this project. Frs. Vincent Fitzpatrick and C. John McCloskey deserve
recognition and appreciation for their providential roles in finding and
effecting an introduction to Prof. Malsbary.

Special heartfelt thanks are offered to Lewis E. Lehrman, the great
living disciple of Prof. Rueff and eminence grise of the classical gold
standard and author of, among other significant works, The True Gold
Standard and Money, Gold, and History, for furnishing the foreword to
Prof. Malsbary's new translation of this timeless classic.

In addition to the gratitude to those already referenced herein, in
justice let tribute be paid to the valiant ones who kept raised the torch
beside the golden door during the classical gold standard's long eclipse. The
roster, too long to recite in its entirety, includes the Hon. S.S. Tarapore, the
Hon. Manuel Hinds, Sean Fieler, Paul Fabra, Prof. Brian Domitrovich, Prof.
Lawrence White, Prof. Richard Timberlake, Prof. James Dorn, Prof. Steve
Hanke, Dr. Ron Paul, Dr. Judy Shelton, Dr. Kurt Schuler, Dr. Lawrence
Parks, Dr. William Gribbin, Steve Forbes, John Allison, Frank Cannon,
Jeffrey Bell, Marion Boteju, John Tamny, James Grant, Howard Segermark,
Seth Lipsky, James Rickards, David Pietrusza, Richard Lowrie, Hugo
Salinas-Price, Patrick Pizzella, Andresen Blom, John Mueller, Nathan
Lewis, and members of the rising generation such as Rich Danker, Terry
Schilling, Jonathan Decker, and Paul Dupont. The world, above all, remains
much indebted to the great Jacques Rueff.


It is an honor to present On the Minting of Money, by Nicolas
Copernicus (1526), translated from the original Latin by Gerald Malsbary
with his prefatory remarks and bibliography. The elegance of the
provenance of the gold standard hereby is restored to its deserved level.


Translator's Preface


A new translation of Nicolas Copernicus's Monetae Cudendae Ratio by
Gerald Malsbary


Prefatory Remarks
and Bibliography


NICOLAS COPERNICUS the astronomer embodies the modern scientific
ideal: the revolutionary revealer of a new, verifiable scientific theory that
shocks our conventional perceptions. However, it is not very widely known,
outside of Eastern Europe at least, that Copernicus also spent about twenty
years working on economic theory. His treatise On the Minting of Money
(Monetae Cudendae Ratio), was first printed in 1826, three hundred years
after its composition in 1525-1526. At the time, the semi-autonomous
ecclesiastical region between Poland and Prussia where he lived (Varmia)
was undergoing a political and economic metamorphosis, and his judgment
and expertise (a fruit of the best late Scholastic and Humanist learning) was
summoned by the Prussian and Polish governments to help stabilize an
inflated currency. Was his insight into monetary matters as revolutionary as
his astronomy?

Copernicus repeatedly emphasizes the difference between the “value”
in precious metal (valor) and the *valuation" (aestimatio). In order for
money to be good, it must not only have a reliable, and not constantly
decreasing, precious metal content; it must also have value qua money: the
sign stamped on the coin, implying trust in the political authority, also adds
a small, but important, value. Recent researches into the origin of money in
early Greek civilization have pointed out that the synthesis of intrinsic value
and conventional value was a crucial step towards modern money. Can
Copernicus's insights — which have not yet become a part of mainstream
economic theory — help clarify in some way the original reason for money
in Western civilization? Another recurring theme is his dislike of
government making a profit from the minting of money through the use of
less and less silver — the provision of reliable, good money, he maintains,


should be a “nonprofit” service on the part of the government to the well-
being of the people. Does this approach involve a “moral” approach to
monetary policy?

The answers to such questions must be left to students of economics
and philosophy, who will be able to place Copernicus's conclusions in a
larger context. Meanwhile, it has been my task here simply to provide
another updated English translation of the Latin original, in order to bring
back to light, or at least a little more into the foreground, an important
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